Digital Marketing Seminar

October 31, 2024

On Tuesday, October 22, there was a presentation at the Oberon Community Centre about the use of social media for marketing and representing businesses. Presenters were Josh Gordon from RDA Central West and Nalinda Ranaweera from Business HQ.

Josh Gordon and Nalinda Ranaweera give out the advice. Photos supplied

Social media is certainly a useful tool for promoting businesses. Oberon Matters wasn't able to get to the seminar, but there are a few warnings that should have been mentioned, derived from many years working with businesses to promote them on the Internet.

1. You do not own anything posted to any of the social media platforms. As an example, Facebook owns any image you post and can modify it (including removal of watermarks) and can use it for any purpose they want to, including training AI systems. Always read the Terms & Conditions carefully. You cannot avoid this, despite the frequent appearance of posts saying something like "Copy and paste this to your timeline to let Facebook know you own your work".
2. Everyone knows how difficult it is to get Facebook to remove even the scammiest scams and Twitter/X is the same, but this doesn't apply to all the platforms. Anyone can get a video removed from YouTube by simply making a copyright claim, and that claim doesn't require a real name from the complainer, unless you think that "Gold tv Prof. Dr. Hans-Peter Steinrück" might be a real person. (That name was used to have two videos removed from YouTube).
3. Everything can disappear without warning. A video producer who was invited to the launch of YouTube's office in Australia and given a free video camera woke up one day to find that all his videos had been removed. No explanation was offered and it is almost impossible to have anyone at YouTube respond (the same applies to contesting a copyright claim). The IT news outlet ArsTechnica spent a year in legal action to get its Facebook page back after it was removed without warning or explanation.
4. You have to monitor your social media presence constantly. This means checking comments on your posts to remove anything harmful, offensive or defamatory. You need to respond to messages promptly (this applies to email as well). All day, every day. The more platforms you use, the more work you have to do, and it all takes time away from what you really do for a living.
5. Your Facebook page will attract the robots and people who can't read. Oberon Matters receives a constant stream through Meta of "people" asking about opening hours, refund policies, delivery options and other things that obviously don't apply to an online news outlet.

The moral of all this is that social media can be very useful to tell potential customers and clients about your business but it shouldn't be the whole story. What it does best is attract attention and interaction and lead people to your corporate web site where you own and control the content. There are exceptions, of course, and if all you want to do is tell people you exist and make the occasional announcement then a Facebook page or Instagram account might be all you need. Just be aware that you might be relying on something that you can't control.

You can see the slides from Nalinda Ranaweera's presentation here

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